The Box

by Jeremy Brown

  It was close to noon and the lunch crowd was picking up.

  Bruder scanned the tables for any Romanians—especially the same crew from the previous day—but didn’t see anyone who tripped the alarm. A young woman in a smart gray suit was at the bar with a bowl of soup and an open laptop, talking on the phone while she poked at the keys and trackpad.

  Bruder and Rison didn’t bother going to the front podium and corral. They just slid into the same booth they’d used the night before and Marie spotted them right away.

  “Too early for beers?”

  “Never,” Rison said, “but we’re hitting the road after this, and it’s probably not a good idea to show up in Omaha smelling like craft beer. So I’ll take an iced tea.”

  Marie pushed her lower lip out.

  “Aw, you guys are leaving?”

  “Yeah, and we’re flying back to Jersey from Omaha. But we’ll be back.”

  “I hope so.”

  She looked at Bruder.

  “I’m gonna miss the conversation with Chatty Cathy here.”

  Rison snorted, and Bruder played along and gave her a put-upon face.

  She said, “Iced tea for you too?”

  “Great.”

  Marie winked at Rison. “See what I mean?”

  “Yeah, he won’t shut up.”

  “I’ll be right back with those drinks.”

  She walked away and Bruder said, “You see the bar?”

  Rison nodded behind his menu.

  “I do. Lawyer?”

  “Maybe. She doesn’t seem local. If she is, maybe she knows something about what our friends are up to.”

  “Maybe she’s in on it,” Rison said.

  Bruder acknowledged the possibility, and also accepted the possibility she was no one of any use or interest to them. But she was an anomaly in the restaurant, and that required some attention.

  Marie brought the iced teas and they both ordered the Lenburger.

  “No steak?” she said.

  “Ah,” Rison said, “gotta have the famous burger one more time before I go.”

  He glanced past her toward the bar.

  “Do we have another first-time burger tourist?”

  Marie turned to see what he was talking about, then came back and put her hands on her hips.

  “Are you cheating on me?”

  Rison covered his heart with both palms.

  “I would never dream of it.”

  “You better not, buster. But no, that’s Nora. She was a few years behind me in school. And by a few, I mean plenty.”

  “Hm,” Bruder said.

  “Hm what?”

  “She doesn’t look that much younger than you.”

  “Now I know why you don’t say much. You’re too full of shit.”

  Rison laughed again and said, “Is she the mayor or something?”

  “Oh, no, she lives in Minneapolis. Her folks have a big spread south of town. Well, had a big spread, I guess. They moved away and Nora’s been coming down every weekend to handle the estate sale, what to do with the land, all of that.”

  Rison shared a quick look with Bruder.

  Bruder said, “Her folks get tired of the winters?”

  Marie paused, just long enough for that thin line to reappear on her mouth.

  “I guess so. I’ll get those burgers cooking for you guys, be right out.”

  When she was gone Rison looked at Nora, the woman at the bar, then at Bruder.

  Bruder said, “Call Connelly. Tell him to get his ass down here. She’s almost done with her soup.”

  Chapter Eight

  Connelly came in the front door of Len’s with the guitar case. The air inside was heavy and warm, almost too hot after the fast walk from the motel, even with the cold wind blowing in his face the whole way.

  The corral was empty and he stood next to the podium, the only person standing up besides the servers, and some of the people at the tables gave him and the case speculative looks. None of the people were Romanian, like Rison had said, so he wasn’t worried about it.

  He spotted Marie at one of the booths with her back to him, then the woman at the bar Rison told him about, and two empty stools between her and a man slumped over whatever was in front of him. Connelly recognized his jacket and hat from the previous day, one of the regulars.

  He navigated between the four-tops and nudged Marie on his way past.

  “I don’t want to take up a whole table. I’ll use the bar.”

  “Of course! And I talked to Len about tonight, calling you was on my list. I’ll be over there in a sec.”

  Connelly went past Bruder and Rison in their booth without looking at them and leaned the guitar against the bar between the two empty stools, then stood behind it like he was shielding it from the rest of the room.

  The man with the beer was on his right, worrying over some scratch tickets, and the woman in the gray suit was on his left. She had shoulder-length auburn hair with subtle blonde highlights. The hair on the left side of her face hung free, the right side tucked behind a small un-pierced ear. She wore very little makeup, if any, and her skin and facial structure had the look of someone who takes pleasure in running long distances regardless of weather.

  She was focused on her laptop and didn’t glance over at him, then her phone vibrated and she picked it up and started stitching at it with her thumbs.

  There wasn’t a bartender that Connelly could see, but Marie swept around the end and started scooping ice into thick plastic cups for one of her tables.

  “So Len said you’re welcome to give it a shot tonight, but if people want to hear the TV, we’ll have to turn it up.”

  “My dear,” Connelly said, “after a few strums on this beauty here, and the first honey-laden notes from me, your lucky patrons will forget television ever existed.”

  “I’m gonna barf,” Marie said. Then, to the woman in the suit: “Don’t listen to a word he says. I think he might be the devil.”

  The woman finally looked up and considered Connelly, and he noticed her green eyes with slashes of gold.

  Then shook her head and went back to her phone.

  “The devil’s taller.”

  Marie’s mouth fell open, and Connelly fell in love.

  Marie filled the cups with iced tea and told Connelly, “You probably need some cheering up after that burn. And good news: When you’re playing here you get half off, starting now. You doing the burger again?”

  Connelly leaned toward the half-empty bowl next to the laptop.

  “How’s the soup?”

  He didn’t ask anyone specific but wanted the woman in the gray suit to answer.

  “Sufficient,” she said. “I only got it because I can eat it with one hand while I work.”

  “Must be important work.”

  She made a face, dismissing the notion.

  “Some people seem to think so.”

  Marie said, “I’ll come back.”

  She gave Connelly a look, knowing exactly what he was up to—or the surface version of it, anyway—and carried the drinks away.

  “You work around here?” Connelly asked.

  She didn’t look away from her laptop.

  “Minneapolis.”

  “Oh, so you’re in town for the big debut.”

  That landed flat for a moment, then she frowned and broke away from the screen.

  “Debut?”

  He nudged the guitar case with his knee.

  “Oh,” she said. “For sure. Because everybody in the Twin Cities knows about…uh…you.”

  “Adam.”

  It was close enough to Aiden to turn his head when someone called it out.

  “Right,” she said.

  He stuck his hand out and she glanced at the laptop again, then finally accepted the fact that she wasn’t going to get any more work done while he was standing there. She turned on her stool and shook his hand.

  “Nora.”

  “Hello Nora. I’m Adam.”

 
“You already said that.”

  “I know. You passing through?”

  “I’m from here.”

  “Oh, born and raised? Then moved to the big city to…what? No wait, let me guess.”

  He narrowed his eyes and leaned back, giving her and the laptop and phone and soup a full appraisal.

  She raised an eyebrow and waited, fighting a smile.

  In Connelly’s experience, most people wanted to know how others saw them, usually to measure how it compared to their own self-image, the one they tried to project into the world. It could be tricky—if he wanted his guess to be accurate, he risked creating discord by naming the thing they didn’t want to be but were all day, to the core, no matter how they tried to hide it.

  It was usually safer to be wildly inaccurate and go from there.

  “Submarine captain,” he said.

  It caught her off guard and she laughed, a loud, short sound that she cut off immediately.

  “Russian spy?”

  “Okay,” she said. “You caught me. Now what about you? We seem about the same age.”

  “That’s rude.”

  “I mean I don’t remember you from school. You’re not from here.”

  “I’m a drifter, Nora. A bard.”

  “A bard.”

  “That’s right. I travel from kingdom to kingdom, entertaining the royal courts and the plebeians alike. In return they offer me hamburgers. And soup, when it’s sufficient.”

  “Not to be rude—again—but aren’t you a little old to be playing rock star?”

  “I’m actually ahead of schedule.”

  She blinked.

  “Explain.”

  “I already did the corporate thing and the house thing and the long-term relationship thing, and now I’m having my midlife crisis about thirty years ahead of schedule.”

  This was mostly bullshit.

  Nora studied him again, trying to figure it out.

  “You used to be corporate?”

  “Why does that surprise you?”

  She just looked at him and waited for him to stop screwing around.

  Connelly grinned. “Yeah, up in Seattle. Marketing, for almost ten years.”

  Which was true, except it was closer to ten weeks.

  In his early twenties he’d made what he considered to be a half-assed attempt to go legitimate in a field that utilized his gifts and interests and gotten fired for pitching what amounted to an illegal gambling ring to one of the clients.

  The firm had found this unacceptable, especially coming from someone working in the copywriting bullpen and pitching the client in the bathroom.

  It had only taken Connelly one week to realize everyone in the company was either secretly or overtly miserable, and now he was trying that angle with Nora; the notion of freedom and escape to someone who felt trapped in a gray suit and shackled by a laptop.

  He gave it a fifty-fifty shot.

  Maybe she loved her work and felt as comfortable in the suit as other people do in pajamas.

  She said, “Ten years, then you got out. And now you do this.”

  “And I’ve never been happier.”

  She thought about that, then said, “Huh.”

  “What do you mean, huh? You thinking about getting out?”

  “No, oh no. I love my job.”

  “Because I could use a bongo player.”

  “Good lord, no. I love my apartment, I love the city…the idea of wandering around with no agenda gives me the hives.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Connelly said, with a tiny bit of pity but not enough to be condescending.

  Just enough to make her want to prove something to him.

  He said, “So you just go back and forth between Minneapolis and here for what, the soup? Your folks?”

  “Ah, it’s a whole mess,” she said.

  And Connelly settled in, getting down to it.

  “I come back every weekend to handle the sale of my parents’ farm,” Nora said.

  Connelly winced.

  “Oh, man. Are they still around?”

  “Arizona. Retired, I guess, but they seem busier now than they ever did here. Mostly golf and pickle ball.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  Nora moved her spoon around in the soup but didn’t bring any out of the bowl.

  “Yes and no. I don’t think they want to be retired. I think they’re trying to stay busy so they don’t have to think about it.”

  “The farm?”

  She pushed the bowl away, apparently done with it.

  “Yeah, and how things ended. And how I’m not taking over the homestead like they’d hoped. And, of course, how things might be different if they’d had a boy along with me. Or instead of me.”

  “Whoa,” Connelly said, legitimately surprised by her candor. “That’s a whole other layer of drama.”

  “Like I said. A mess.”

  “You said ‘how things ended’. Not to get too personal, but was it a bank thing? Foreclosure?”

  Nora shook her head.

  “Nothing like that. Although the bank is being a pain in my ass right now. They won’t give anybody a loan to buy it because the appraisal keeps coming back lower than the asking price. But that’s a whole other thing. For my folks, some things changed around here in the past few years and they decided it was time to get out of the business altogether. Out of Iowa, even.”

  “What, like the government wanted them to start growing weed?”

  She laughed again, softer this time, and let it run its course instead of cutting it short.

  “That would actually be nice compared to reality.”

  “So…it’s pretty bad?”

  Nora ran a finger around the edge of her laptop, not touching any keys, just clearing some bits of dust and smudges.

  “When you were working in Seattle, did you ever see a corporate takeover?”

  “Like, hostile takeovers?”

  “Sure.”

  Connelly pursed his lips.

  “I commandeered the catered omelet bar once. That got pretty ugly.”

  Her mouth smiled but her eyes were focused on the middle distance, looking at something only she could see. Whatever it was, it made her sad.

  Connelly said, “Let me try another guess. This time I’ll get it, you watch…Okay, some corporation came in and tried to buy the farm from your folks, and they were all, Hell no, Nora’s taking it over. Then you were like, I’m doing what now? Uh, no, hard pass. And they got pissed and moved to Arizona.”

  “Not quite,” Nora said. “But it’s closer than submarine captain.”

  “So lay it out for me. Maybe I can help.”

  “Do you want to buy my family farm?”

  “How much?”

  Connelly reached into his pocket for his wallet and came out with the key to his motel room.

  He made sure she saw it, just a peek, then stuffed it back in.

  “If it’s more than forty bucks I probably can’t afford it. But hey, I could write a song about it. Spread the word about your plight. A ballad, something about how the collapse of the nuclear family is causing fallout across the heartland.”

  Nora was slightly horrified.

  “That’s terrible. I mean, not a terrible song idea. But the idea of it is terrible.”

  “Such is the burden of the bard, sweet Nora. Just ask John Cougar.”

  “Who?”

  Connelly caught movement and turned to see Rison and Bruder walking out, empty baskets and a small pile of cash on their table. They didn’t look over at him.

  He turned back to Nora.

  “Tell me more about the farm. I want to be able to picture it.”

  Nora told him a little bit about the spread, southwest of town with enough acreage around it you couldn’t really see any of the neighbors, who were also farmers.

  She seemed eager to tell a stranger about it, like she could create the version she wanted and not have to worry about any cracks or stains.

  “My dad
dug a pond in the front yard with a backhoe and put a fountain in it, and I used to run around it and count the frogs jumping in. And there’s this huge pine tree next to the house, and we’d use a bucket truck to put Christmas lights on it every year. You could see it for miles. It was obnoxious.”

  Connelly said, “Are you sure you want to sell this place? I mean, it sounds like a Norman Rockwell painting.”

  “God, yes. I’d go crazy out there by myself. And even if I leased the farmland, like I did this year, there’s a ton of upkeep. My dad loved puttering around on his tractors all day but I’d get bored in about ten minutes.”

  Connelly ordered food and they talked more, bouncing around on topics like the live music scene in Minneapolis to how her folks liked the weather in Arizona but missed the fall colors to Ford vs. Chevy, which turned playfully contentious.

  Nora kept one eye on her phone and dismissed a few incoming calls, a good sign for Connelly.

  Marie was behind the bar clearing his basket and silverware, grinning at the two of them, then she glanced over Nora’s shoulder at the front door and the smile vanished.

  “You might want to go, sweetie.”

  Nora and Connelly both turned, and Connelly saw two of the same Romanians from the previous day walk past the podium and take a table near the front of the restaurant.

  There was a third man with them Connelly didn’t recognize, and he was absolutely certain he would have remembered him.

  The man was at least six and a half feet tall, ducking his way out of the corral, and so thin Connelly could see the angles of his skull. His cheeks were hollow triangles and his eye sockets looked sucked into his head, and when he looked around at the other tables Connelly noticed the bright, burning blue eyes of someone who, at one point in time, knew real hunger.

  The eyes landed on Nora and the man smiled, his lips sliding over large teeth, a few capped with silver.

  Nora turned and put the laptop and phone into the messenger bag at her feet.

  She told Marie, “I need to pay. Now.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you next time.”

  Nora gave her a look of gratitude.

  Connelly pretended to be ignorant of all of it.